Controversial POV? Open licences

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Do open licences stifle creativity by encouraging people to hitch their wagons to shit systems


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Llew ap Hywel

Lord of Misrule
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In all the furore is it possible the death of the OGL could be a good thing.

Apart from reducing the amount of D&D crap could we see more creative new systems or better systems being used for games.
 
No, there's plenty of new and innovative systems, too many even. What it does is let people who aren't into designing systems design and publish worlds and stories without producing yet another heartbreaker.
A truly valid point of view. Although I will note that all the current OGL has done is perpetuate more shite so I’m not sure it was to the consumer advantage.

Perhaps an age of truly open licensing across good systems might be something to look forward to.
 
In all the furore is it possible the death of the OGL could be a good thing.

Apart from reducing the amount of D&D crap could we see more creative new systems or better systems being used for games.
No.

The d20 era has seen several innovative new systems created, most notably Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark which have had a lot of traction. Given that most innovation in game mechanics is mainly incremental, with most being tweaks on existing systems, I don’t see this as particularly different from any other era.

It does stop crap fantasy heartbreakers being created to publish some creator’s original fantasy world or adventure, which I think is a good thing. You shouldn’t have to create your own not-D&D to publish a fantasy setting.
 
No.

The d20 era has seen several innovative new systems created, most notably Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark which have had a lot of traction. Given that most innovation in game mechanics is mainly incremental, with most being tweaks on existing systems, I don’t see this as particularly different from any other era.

It does stop crap fantasy heartbreakers being created to publish some creator’s original fantasy world or adventure, which I think is a good thing. You shouldn’t have to create your own not-D&D to publish a fantasy setting.

Another solid argument, I think Blades in the Dark is a fantastic addition to the field. Did it really need the OGL though?
 
That's not the question you asked though. The question is, "was Blades in the Dark stifled by the existence of the OGL" and the answer is clearly no.
Not trying to move the goalposts just a follow on thought.

I see a lot of settings that could have been tied to better systems, are only a whisker away from being new systems and wonder if the creators would have made better choices if they had had no choice to use the OGL.
 
Not trying to move the goalposts just a follow on thought.

I see a lot of settings that could have been tied to better systems, are only a whisker away from being new systems and wonder if the creators would have made better choices if they had had no choice to use the OGL.
Can you give some examples?

I think a lot of people just don't want to develop new mechanics. I also think that developing new mechanics is a different skill than say creating a fantasy world or creating fun adventures (those two also aren't the same skill). There's some overlap, but you can be good at one thing without being good at the others.
 
Can you give some examples?

I think a lot of people just don't want to develop new mechanics. I also think that developing new mechanics is a different skill than say creating a fantasy world or creating fun adventures (those two also aren't the same skill). There's some overlap, but you can be good at one thing without being good at the others.
Well thats why I also say better systems. I think the one argument I don’t hear is that other game studio’s probably wouldn’t have licensing if it wasn’t for the OGL.

Examples, honestly 90% of the settings/games being published or Kickstarted for 5e would have been better off with another system. When I see things like Stargate or Talislanta being shoehorned into 5e I despair. I’d argue settings like Fateforge or Midgard would be a 1000x better in better systems.

Maybe my argument is inconsistent and possibly a little nonsensical but i remember the dark days of the OGL coming in and wall to wall bloody D&D in my gameshops.
 
On balance, I think open licenses are a good thing. As has been said, it lets people use an established system who aren't into developing mechanics (plus, if the system has been used a number of times, any issues are probably documented and have been addressed at some point).

Whether a game or company should use a specific open system probably varies from game to game, though.
 
Well thats why I also say better systems. I think the one argument I don’t hear is that other game studio’s probably wouldn’t have licensing if it wasn’t for the OGL.

Examples, honestly 90% of the settings/games being published or Kickstarted for 5e would have been better off with another system. When I see things like Stargate or Talislanta being shoehorned into 5e I despair. I’d argue settings like Fateforge or Midgard would be a 1000x better in better systems.

Maybe my argument is inconsistent and possibly a little nonsensical but i remember the dark days of the OGL coming in and wall to wall bloody D&D in my gameshops.
That's a result of a fad and a glut though. And the same goes for every system. I happen to like D&D, although I don't think every setting is suited for the game, but I dislike Savage Worlds and Fate, so any settings released tied to those is "oh well, money saved I guess" for me. But that doesn't mean it isn't good for someone else, someone who likes Savage Worlds.
 
I think it is good for there to be an open license to make D&D-like material of some kind, but I also think it's good that the current crisis has encourage some D&D-only people to take a look at the larger field.
I think Paizo including lots of other companies in their ORC announcements might help make it clear that this new license, just like the original OGL before it, can be used with any game system and isn't just about D&D or in this case Pathfinder.
 
I'd agree with you to an extent. I do see the d20 glut as perhaps the least creative period overall in RPG history. And that was part of its purpose; with all the recent Wizards fuckups it can be easily overlooked that one of its explicit aims was to strengthen the market dominance of D&D after a weak period and it largely managed to achieve that.

I'm not saying all d20 games were bad obviously (although aside from Mutants & Masterminds I'm hard pressed to think of another D20 game that can be considered a major creative success). Just that it was an easy and lazy route that lead to a higher proportion of dull games than normal.

I feel the same about Apocalypse World. The original? Definitely a classic of the 10s and a major work. And there's lots of designers who created great games with the engine, Blades in the Dark being the greatest of the AW inspired games. But there's also a lot of 'designers' who chucked a few playbooks into a PDF, made no alterations to the system and called it done. (For whatever reason BitD games don't seem to have this issue anywhere near as much. I think part of it is that AW appears deceptively simple when it comes to design).
 
In all the furore is it possible the death of the OGL could be a good thing.

Apart from reducing the amount of D&D crap could we see more creative new systems or better systems being used for games.

I remember the 90s, so that seems like an unlikely premise to me.
 
Spycraft and Fantasy Craft were good OGL games, if a bit chunky. They both added new things to the plate.
 
We remember the handful of good ones. There were so, so, so many bad ones.
This is so true, there was a lot of crap not just D&D.

Not sure I agree with all points made but it'll be interesting to see if this newer open era of RPG's brings a boom or a bust.
 
I'm not saying all d20 games were bad obviously (although aside from Mutants & Masterminds I'm hard pressed to think of another D20 game that can be considered a major creative success).
I can't think of much, but there were a few. Horizon: Grimm I think worked really well, although when they went to publishing it with its own system it improved.

D20 Modern I think was quite good, as was CoC d20. Showed a bit of an irony that the d20 System was least suited to fantasy.
 
I've come to see system as only a small part of games so it doesn't bother me that people are reusing rules instead of making new ones. I agree that, in the 5e arena, some are hesitant to adjust the rules enough to fit the setting because of compatibility concerns, but that isn't always the case. Look at Adventures in Middle Earth (which I consider as good as TOR), Beowulf, and Brancalonia as examples of 5e adjusted to the game. Further afield almost every good thing that Necrotic Gnome and Goodman Games has done is possible from the OGL.

On the other hand, I'm not seeing a lack of new systems.
 
This is so true, there was a lot of crap not just D&D.

And it's important to remember D&D isn't the only system released under the OGL..OpenD6, Fate, Fudge, 4C, GORE, Iridium, Diaspora, Mutant Future, vsM Engine, Fantasy Craft, Ebon Fantasy Essence, Spellchrome, Runic, etc etc...
 
While they weren't my jam, I heard good tings about the d20 versions of Call of Cthulhu and Star Wars.

Edit: Oops forgot the rest of the comment. Yeah there was a lot of sludge during the d20 glut, but iirc Exalted 1st Edition also came out at around the same time as 3rd/3.5e was starting to go stale. And the glut of d20 sourcebooks for every conceivable thing was still handy for me as a GM; I might not have been running a lot of D&D then (just one multi-year campaign) but in terms of sourcebooks there was a lot of readable/usable material floating around.
 
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We remember the handful of good ones. There were so, so, so many bad ones.
I think the larger number of mechanically weak games in the '90s was unrelated to the fact that D&D wasn't at the top. It's because the '90s were the decade where the '80s kids went out into the world seeking degrees, careers, opposite-sex companionship and intoxicants. As someone that worked in a game store that decade, I saw a lot of guys that weren't actually doing any gaming coming into the store once a week or so to buy a stack of books with their shiny adult incomes. They were still gamers in their hearts, and reading game books made them happy.

White Wolf could get away with books full of metaplot with little to no use at the table as long as people found them fun to read. I didn't play D&D in the '90s, so feel free to correct me, but I remember a general sense that 2E went mechanically off-the-rails as well with unbalanced character kits. Mechanical tightness takes time, and time is money. When you have a large audience that will buy untested rules, why bother? Many kinds of books that are useful for GMs aren't the best reads. I book of cool tables to generate a sandbox is great, but its less interesting to read than a metaplot book.

3E actually came out at the perfect time, when the '80s players were ready to settle down and play proper campaigns again, and that led to games caring more about mechanics as well. The RPG online community was established by then as well.

I think an exodus from D&D today would be closer to the original one of the '70s and '80s as there are a lot of people actually playing at the moment.

The post Vampire RPG scene was great though. In Nomine. Underground. Unknown Armies. What's not to like?
One of my groups just decided to add Underground to our upcoming schedule. It and Unknown Armies are undoubtedly great, but I didn't really like the system for In Nomine when I ran it. For me at least, it was one of those '90s games with a great setting and premies, perfect art design, and underwhelming mechanics.
 
While they weren't my jam, I heard good tings about the d20 versions of Call of Cthulhu and Star Wars.
Call of Cthuhu D20 is good, but it does so by essentially being Call of Cthulhu in the way it plays. I'm happy to play either, but as a GM the original wins. It has one of the best supplement lines out there, while the D20 version has close to nothing. In fact, I think one of the two adventures from the D20 core has already been converted to Delta Green, which is Call of Cthulhu compatible.
 
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Call of Cthuhu is good, but it does so by essentially being Call of Cthulhu in the way it plays. I'm happy to play either, but as a GM the original wins. It has one of the best supplement lines out there, while the D20 version has close to nothing. In fact, I think one of the two adventures from the D20 core has already been converted to Delta Green, which is Call of Cthulhu compatible.
Yeah, "not my jam" means I preferred the original systems and so our groups saw no reason to switch. I think 2nd/3rd edition CoC was our sweet spot, but I have a ton of CoC books, including 7th edition. And I'm ride or die for WEG Star Wars.

I'm sure that during the d20 OGL years a few people who would never have tried either game had their horizons opened, which can only be a good thing. Here's hoping the current fuckery leads to a similar widening of tastes and experiences, along with a plurality of decent systems for designers to work with.
 
Well thats why I also say better systems. I think the one argument I don’t hear is that other game studio’s probably wouldn’t have licensing if it wasn’t for the OGL.

Examples, honestly 90% of the settings/games being published or Kickstarted for 5e would have been better off with another system. When I see things like Stargate or Talislanta being shoehorned into 5e I despair. I’d argue settings like Fateforge or Midgard would be a 1000x better in better systems.

Maybe my argument is inconsistent and possibly a little nonsensical but i remember the dark days of the OGL coming in and wall to wall bloody D&D in my gameshops.

I see this claim all the time that the early 2000s was nothing but d20, and that is just wrong. There was a lot of d20 because it sold, but there was a lot of other stuff being developed alongside it.

Something else that was a big factor was distribution was changing. There were only a couple of large distributors that had a bit of a stranglehold on the market. With the internet still being kind of new a lot of the smaller game companies began to resort to direct sales because they were having trouble getting onto the shelves. There were several games I tried to get through my local shop to support them, and ultimately I had to order direct from the publisher because the stores couldn't get it. These days we have many more places to get games other than a brick and mortar shop. DTRPG was nothing like it is now back in the d20 heyday.

You also have to remember the late 90s was not a good time for publishing games, a lot of the big game publishers went out of business between 1990 and 2000, so when the d20 craze began, they were not pushing established games to the side, they were filling a vacuum.

Early 2000s you had a return of the HERO system with 5E under a new company(DOJ).
SJG finally released the long expected 4E GURPS.
Chaosium rose from the grave with both a d20 CoC as well as a new edition (6E) and more new material. They also started their Monograph line of publishing pdfs, a lot of stuff that wasn't seen as viable through traditional publishing. Pdf game supplements were still unpopular as paperless wasn't well liked by fans and publishers worried about pirated copies. I'll note Classic Fantasy was one of those products which has now been published hard copy under both BRP and Mythras.
Traveller was reissued by Mark Miller after GDW closed
Mongoose released MRQ which eventually became Mythras.
The Riddle of Steel was published during this time, which is still a pretty big departure from any other RPGs.
Fate was introduced at this time and was successful despite d20.
Decipher put out their Lord of the Rings and Star Trek games using the Coda system. They ultimately failed but not because of d20.
Pinnacle began as a d20 producer, and later went on to develop Savage Worlds.

So there was a lot out there besides d20, but a lot of it wasn't in the shops because a lot of shops preferred to carry d20 stuff which sold better.

All the stuff for 5E is out there not so much because of the OGL, but because 5E outsells everything else. 5E is the Walmart of games. If there wasn't an OGL a lot of this stuff would likely still be for 5E just more subtlety like the old days of AD&D where they hinted at stats, with a licensing agreement from WOTC or maybe (and likely) it just wouldn't exist at all.
 
Apart from reducing the amount of D&D crap could we see more creative new systems or better systems being used for games.
RPG will center around "D&D crap" for the forseeable future, just like ever. Cue the astronaut with gun meme.

I mean, didn't we all get our monkey paw wishes already when 4E came out and third party businesses systems moved away from doing everything in D20? What did we get out of this? A few more badly supported Green Ronin systems, but this time not based around the 3E SRD. A thousand Pathfinder books.

The rest of the hobby moved as always. I doubt that D&D was a big influence on either HERO/GURPS gamers (all two of them), nor the people who are into "PbtA" or Improv-FUDGE. So I'd regard those as separate strands. Few groups ask themselves "Should we play this shiny WotC adventure with plenty of read-aloud text or Night's Black Agents?".

And until the second coming of Gygax, the OSR scene won't change anyways.
 
Call of Cthuhu D20 is good, but it does so by essentially being Call of Cthulhu in the way it plays. I'm happy to play either, but as a GM the original wins. It has one of the best supplement lines out there, while the D20 version has close to nothing. In fact, I think one of the two adventures from the D20 core has already been converted to Delta Green, which is Call of Cthulhu compatible.
And to correct myself, I just remembered that P/X Poker Night, the D20 adventure that has been converted to Delta Green, was actually in Dungeon Magazine, not in the core book. To my knowledge, neither of those has been converted to Delta Green.
 
Few groups ask themselves "Should we play this shiny WotC adventure with plenty of read-aloud text or Night's Black Agents?".

I have run at the same con, an AD&D 2e dungeon crawl in Undermountain, and Narrative Cage Match (Pantheon and Other RPGs), and had some of the same players in both games. There are those of us who are really down to try anything if someone's running it.
 
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Mongoose's RuneQuest became Legend. The Design Mechanism's became Mythras.
It's a bit more intertwined than that. MRQII was designed by Whitaker and Nash, who made RQ 6, which became Mythras after loss of line. RQ 6 has some tweaks from RQ II, but is basically the same game, and it's easy to use MRQII material with it. Legend is just straight MRQII with the IP scraped off.

Pinnacle began as a d20 producer, and later went on to develop Savage Worlds.
Pinnacle started with Deadlands, which was one of the top sellers in my store in the late '90s. It was a big enough product that when Pinnacle made it's next few months of releases available at GenCon one year as a treat for the customers, it put a noticeable dent in my sales. I was in Chicago, and this was when GenCon was in Milwaukee, so everyone who shopped at my store went there for at least a day.

When D20 came out, Pinnacle released Deadlands D20, which was not like by anyone that I know of. To make it worse, all Deadlands book became dual-statted for both systems. Fading Suns took the same approach, and it was equally bad. Nobody likes dual-statted books, and 3E-era D20 made it worse as it had such bloated stat blocks. Deadlands and Fading Suns fans didn't feel the books were worth it anymore and both games died.

You are right about the distribution problems at the time. Distributors only wanted D20, which is why publishers felt obliged to make shovelware like Deadlands D20 or Dragon Lords of Melnibone. Established game lines would get pushed to side in favor of pop-up D20 publishers.

We are lucky that PDF sales became viable over that time, giving new a new form of distribution, otherwise it would have been even more devastating.

Getting back to Pinnacle, they went dormant for a few years and came back as Great White Games to release Savage Worlds, which based on Great Rails Wars, a fantastic mini skirmish game for the Deadlands setting. Once it took off, they revived the Pinnacle name again.
 
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